Aerospace Seminar on: State Estimation: Cubature Filters and Sliding Mode Observers

Speaker: Dr. Bharani Chandra Kumar Pakki, Post-doctoral researcher at the University of Exeter
Date: Wednesday (7th January, 2015)
Time: 03:30 pm
Venue: Seminar room, Aerospace Engineering
Tea will be served at 3:15 pm.

Abstract

State estimation plays a key role in several real life applications. In most of the cases it is not advisable to measure the complete states of the system due to system limitations or the sensors used for measurements are bulky, noisy or expensive. In this talk two classes of state estimators will be presented. The first class consists of recently developed cubature filters namely cubature information filters and cubature H-infinity filters. Cubature information filters are developed in information domain and they can easily be extended for multiple sensors, whereas cubature H-infinity filters are deveoped by fusing cubature Kalman filter and H-infinity filter and can handle non-Gaussian noise. The square root versions of these filters are further developed for numerical accuracy. The efficacy of these filters are validated on SLAM (simultaneous localisation and mapping) problem. The next class of filters consist of LPV (linear parameter varying) sliding mode observer. This observer has a capability to deal with inexact scheduling parameter knowledge. Further, it is developed to reconstruct the faults. This observer is then used to reconstruct the actuator faults of a high-fidelity aircraft model.

Biographical Sketch of Speaker

Bharani Chandra Kumar Pakki received B.Tech degree from JNTU, Hyderabad, India, M.Tech in Control Systems from College of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram, India and Ph.D from University of Leicester, UK. Before joining Ph.D, for a short period, he worked as a research assistant at Dept. of Aerospace Engineering at IISc, Bangalore and at IIT-Bombay, India. He also worked as an assistant Professor at GMRIT, India and was a Team lead, Control Systems Group at Coral Digital Technologies (P) Ltd., Bangalore, India. Currently he is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Exeter.

His research interests include control systems design, state estimation and robotics. He has published a few papers in refereed conferences and journals.

Aerospace Seminar on: CFD and Hypersonic Flows

Speaker: Dr. Akshay Prakash, Senior Researcher at Technical University of Graz, Austria
Date: Thursday (1st January, 2015)
Time: 03:30 pm
Venue: Seminar room, Aerospace Engineering
Tea will be served at 3:15 pm.

Abstract

The talk will focus on use of CFD as a research tool, particularly in hypersonic flows where experimental and flight test data are not easy to obtain. Shock fitting methods have recently been used to study the receptivity process for hypersonic boundary layer. These methods are particularly suited for receptivity studies since they are capable of a uniformly high order solution throughout the computational domain, including the near-shock regions. Further research efforts will include addition of state-to-state kinetics and effects of surface curvature and roughness. Also included in the discussion will be alternatives to increase simulation capabilities to include larger domains. One such way is to use the highly parallelizable LBM, which have recently been extended to supersonic flows. Other techniques like adaptive mesh refinement also have potential to enhance the efficiency of solution schemes, making simulation of larger domains more feasible.

Biographical Sketch of Speaker

Dr. Akshay Prakash earned his BTech and MTech from IITB, India in Mechanical Engineering in the year 2005. Thereafter in 2011 he was awarded PhD from UCLA on accomplishment of his research, aimed at understanding receptivity and stability of hypersonic boundary by studying the effects of thermochemical non-equilibrium in a Mach 5.7 air flow over a blunt body. Dr. Prakash thereafter contributed towards two different Postdoctoral researches. The first was a simulation of a new IFMIF design by ENEA using Fluent. His contribution was towards establishing the safety margins for the range of prescribed design operating conditions. The latest of the researches was an industrially-collaborated research on the turbulence modelling of a large Bioreactor based on the highly parallelizable Lattice Boltzmann Methods.